AMD Linux Catalyst: Hardware Owners Screwed?

[diriel]

Not a gamer anymore....

But I still enjoy playing games from time to time. My 3870 still plays most games OK...not like a new 7980 etc... but genuinely ok. I was full on planning to build a new system mid next year anyhow... but this really pisses me off on principle! Hell, I had an OLD ass Nvidia GForce 4400ti in a rig i retired but kept for several years. Nvidia never dropped support for it! I was able to "Game" on it LONG LONG past that cards prime... well guests were able to I had my much newer AMD rig.. Vs. and older intel 733...

[diriel]

Quari...

Games get patched...drivers need updates to cope... in 5 years you can seriously forget about it. Sad to say but true.

[diriel]

Qauri

I said over the course of 5 years sir... drivers / games drive apart... NOW...Yes sir i can game NOW... Pains me that in about 2 years my friends who rarely come over anymore will not be able to game ... like the old days that are gone Reactionary. Past. Still pisses me off :P

[diriel]

Try Fedora 17

using the 3870.... the card is semi dead Right Bloody Now. I CAN get it working...but piss on it. I do not really enjoy Ubuntu anymore. Unity and company left me cold sir. But life is about change.

[diriel]

Cat

Catalyst is dead. It is possible but a pain. Kubuntu is dead I like SystemD believe it or not... who knows maybe try Debian 7 or Suse....

[Kano]

For AMD gfx it is like this: if there is a new gfx hardware out like DX9, DX10, DX11, the older cards are dropped after about 2-3 years after the new ones came out. So when ms invents DX12 with much more features your current cards will be unsupported 2-3 years later, no matter if you can still can play games on it. For win you have got a more stable environment and therefore you can use the cards longer with the basically same driver but you might need a new card when a game exposes some driver problems. For linux the driver needs more attention which is AMD not willing to do, so you lost here completely. I absolutely never told somebody to get AMD gfx for Linux - the oss effort is a joke compared to intel where you can at least use vaapi. The fglrx driver is faulty by definition and does not support current kernels + xservers when they come out - only when Ubuntu releases a new version, thats so great... I would even say that nouveau devs do a much better job - even for hardware where you still can get official binary drivers. The reclocking/powermanagment is problematic, bit the supported features are increasing very fast. Because of not so different hardware architectures even kepler was working (with some drawbacks) at launchday, AMD is far away from that. AMD does everything but only 50% compared to others, the oss driver lacks va features, the binary is always behind upstream and xvba is not capable of h264 l5.1... They do nothing with 100% commitment.

[RussianNeuroMancer]

The fglrx driver is faulty by definition and does not support current kernels + xservers when they come out - only when Ubuntu releases a new version, thats so great...

fglrx 8.98 support Fedora 17, did you notice that?

[Kano]

well every rule can have some exceptions, but i would have liked when u 12.04 switched over to xserver 1.12 early so that amd had to work on xserver 1.12 support sooner, but that did not happen and now we have got the mess that for older hardware there will never be xserver 1.12 support.

[TobiSGD]

Dropping the pre-HD5000 support is not dropping support for legacy hardware. It is dropping support for current hardware. Get a nice FX4/6/8-series CPU with a mainboard with integrated graphics. What will you get? Wait, a HD4000 series chip? And you can only use half of it when you use a current distro because you have to use open source drivers that only are using a half of the chip you just paid for? Or you have to choose a crap distro like whatever-buntu to use the non-free drivers for your chip?
Or, better, just buy a newer discrete card (preferably from AMD, of course) and abandon the chip you just paid for, because they are AMD and they don't give a fuck?

No thanks, not for me.

[Azpegath]

Dropping the pre-HD5000 support is not dropping support for legacy hardware. It is dropping support for current hardware. Get a nice FX4/6/8-series CPU with a mainboard with integrated graphics. What will you get? Wait, a HD4000 series chip? And you can only use half of it when you use a current distro because you have to use open source drivers that only are using a half of the chip you just paid for? Or you have to choose a crap distro like whatever-buntu to use the non-free drivers for your chip?
Or, better, just buy a newer discrete card (preferably from AMD, of course) and abandon the chip you just paid for, because they are AMD and they don't give a fuck?

No thanks, not for me.

I agree. It's current hardware.

But when I think about it, what would be the alternative? How is the Nvidia support regarding KMS? Ok, so say I can live without KMS, the Nvidia support is pretty good when it comes to 0-day support for new Xorg-releases. Right? I haven't had an Nvidia card in many years, so my memory is a bit foggy regarding that.
The FOSS-perspective on it is that the noveau driver is way behind the radeon driver. Both for stability, support of hardware and performance. So AMD wins that one...
Intel has the best FOSS driver, but their cards are crap, so from a gaming perspective it would just be a waste of money.

So what's really the best option? Getting screwed (openly) by AMD, or hopping on the (proprietary) Nvidia bandwagon?